


The Thing With Feathers That Perches in the Soul

by EstherGreenwood



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Canon, Dragons and cool shit like that, Eventual Sandor Clegane/Sansa Stark, F/M, Friendship, M/M, Pirates, Platonic Sansa Stark/Original Male Character, Road Trips, Romance, Very very veryyyy slow burn, very slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 04:45:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1805803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EstherGreenwood/pseuds/EstherGreenwood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa Stark makes a friend in the Eyrie, which sets some very strange things into motion (or in other words, the little bird learns to fly).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing With Feathers That Perches in the Soul

               Magnus Stone, called Mack by his friends, was a man infatuated with life. He was of the charismatic and often foolhardy kind sort that ravages the world with mad gusto, all the while remaining completely impervious to it’s great injustices. Although he was by no means traditionally handsome, there was a rare and indefinable beauty to his face, a charm to his long sloping brows, a charisma in his boyish eyes as green as the Narrow Sea in summer.

His mother had been an ugly but buxom barmaid from Gulltown, the daughter of a grizzled ironborn sea captain with just a smattering of noble blood in his veins. Mack’s father was from an obscure branch of house Cerwyn, not too proud to be above drunkenly seducing a barmaid but proud enough to soberly deny the bastard that came screaming from her loins shortly before the fever took her.

His childhood, spent beneath the tutelage of his grandfather, was an aimless but lively one. By the time he was teetering on the cusp of manhood, Mack had never been entirely settled anywhere but the Kraken’s Revenge, his grandfather’s mighty hulking ship. He had made the journey from Braavos to Gulltown more times than he could count (which wasn’t saying very much, as Mack was about as bright as a crow when it came to scholarly pursuits) and considered himself to be a seasoned sailor as well as a man of the world.

He grew to be good-tempered and confident, a brilliant fool with a great passion for pleasure, or as his grandfather often put it, a cheeky little shit who thought himself much more clever than he actually was. His great loves were storytelling, fucking pretty men with well-sculpted arses (a preference he tended to mask with the occasional wink at pretty girls with well-sculpted arses), drinking Dornish wine, and sailing so far from land that all he could see was open water on all sides.

This was why his banishment from the Kraken’s Revenge wounded him as much as it did. It had all started with Emeric, his grandfather’s quartermaster. He was the rugged epitome of all Mack lusted madly after, and after he had forgotten himself one night and tried to fondle the man, the captain decided a wild life devoid of women had begun to have a negative impact on his grandson.

Mack was promptly exiled from the merriment and brine he loved so greatly to the Eyrie, where an old friend of the captain’s served as one of Lady Arryn’s guards. He could hold a sword and shoot a crossbow, and was deemed sufficient enough loiter about outside the Bloody Gate waiting for anyone foolish enough to try to attack it. It was a grim life. He hated the way his heavy armor anchored him to that bleak little mountain pass, hated how the wind smelled of pine instead of the ocean. His fellow guards were as grey and impassive as the mountains they guarded, not nearly as spritely as the sailors and thugs that had been his boyhood companions.

But he was an ambitious young man, and once his heart mended and his good humor was restored, he worked his way up the ranks until he was appointed to guard Sweetrobin himself. The boy was sickly and a little foolish, but he was easy enough to please with Mack’s sweeping (albeit slightly embellished) epics of his adventures across the Narrow Sea. Lady Arryn had some casual regard for her son’s new keeper, especially when he made the little lord laugh so loud it echoed through the vacant stone halls of the Eyrie.

Mack would have preferred to work for Catelyn Stark, who came storming into the High Hall a few days before his twenty fourth nameday with a deformed little man in tow, no bigger than a monkey he’d once paid a few coins to see dance in Pentos. She seemed to have taken the hardships of life with less difficulty than her sister, and though she spoke with conviction, there was never malice in her voice.

It didn’t matter much, though. Catelyn Stark and her little Lannister prisoner came and went, as did countless other lords and ladies pleading for the Arryns to take up arms in the War of the Five Kings. Lady Lysa remained as unmoved as stone, and despite Mack’s general distaste for the woman, he had to admire her for that. A hundred miles away, lions and wolves ripped one another apart with gnashing teeth, kings were slaughtered in their beds or at their tables, but the Vale stood silent and passive, as powerful as an ancient mountain god in slumber.

Then Petyr Baelish arrived. He was a small man, dressed plainly but tastefully, with a voice so polite and reasonable that it thoroughly unnerved Mack. He was proud of his ability to see through the guises people so often put up to play their silly power games, yet Lord Baelish proved an elegant and intricate riddle with no answer. Every thing that happened in the Vale, no matter how large or small, was part of Baelish’s design, the result of some mechanism of his that contributed to a larger and unfathomable plan. The fact that Lady Lysa was dead within a fortnight of his return to the Eyrie shocked no one, least of all Mack.

Alayne Stone, the quiet young bastard Lord Baelish had installed rather suddenly in his court, was a different story. She was a pretty slip of girl, unassuming and pliant to the whims of her uncle. Robert adored her, and Mack soon found Alayne supplanting him as the chief entertainer of the young lord. She played the dutiful niece (or daughter? Mack was never quite sure), just as he played the dutiful guard keeping silent watch over a boy who wouldn't see fifteen. Yet she always gave the faint impression that she was in some horrible kind of pain.

Alayne brought to mind a quivering little fawn he had seen as a boy during one of his few ventures beyond Gulltown. It’s knobby leg was caught in a snare, and it looked so terribly alone in the world that Mack had scrambled out of their cart to pry the rusty mouth of the trap open. It’s useless, his grandfather had told him with a rare gleam of kindness, then ushered him back to the cart. Some loud mouthed sailor he had known on the Kraken’s Revenge once said that animals often pretend to be healthy when they’re sick or wounded, because looking weak makes it easier for the bigger animals to prey on them. This girl had been caught in a snare, Mack decided, but hid it by smiling and curtsying and repeating _“Yes, Lord Baelish,”_ again and again and again.

Alayne was so sweet and bland that it was just a little too convincing, and she played the role so well she must at one point have been that sweet bland girl she so immaculately imitated. Despite the sweet blandness (which was, Mack suspected, a facade), the girl interested him greatly, and he made it a habit to watch her from afar, especially when he started noticing the devouring gaze Baelish covertly shot at her when he thought no one could see.

He had exchanged passing words with her three or four times when, after being roused by a soft rapping on his door in the dead of night, he found Alayne Stone standing barefoot outside his chambers, the candle in her hand giving wan light to a quietly determined look in her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Whelp, there is it. The first chapter is almost written, so that'll be up pretty soon. Anyway, hope you like it! To quote an ancient proverb, this is my first fic so be gentle my darlings. The title is a quote from 254 by Emily Dickinson.  
> (Also, Sweetrobin/Robin is the nickname of Robert Arryn, Sansa's cousin, in the books, so hopefully that wasn't too confusing)


End file.
